I've been "forced" to work in DOS all morning since my sons PC wouldn't boot from a nasty virus and it made me feel a bit nostalgic and knowing there are people of all ages here I was wondering if anyone had any memories from their first computer? Mine was a C64 I still have somewhere, with a tape-deck and a Tac-2. The joy of spending half a day sweating in frustration over BASIC to get your name flashing in color on the screen.
Very first - TRS80 and I don't recall the OS (I was 6) Second, which I had for a lot longer, was a TI/99-4A, with tape drive. Gotta love saving stuff to audio tape at 300 baud.
Heh. The first was a Packard-Bell with a truncated issue of DOS 3.11 and the cheap version of what eventually became Word and Excel (can't remember the name of that program.) Seems like PB built a slew of them that didn't sell well, so I got modern for what was then cheap. Yes, it was cheap, and behaved that way. That one never went on line, but sure did have my share of BSOD, almost a daily occurrance. Taught me to fear opening the registry to make changes (in DOS) forced by the odd responses. I bet I booted into safe mode more than normal mode. It taught me not to diddle with file extensions. Wow, what a mess I made of the file system. Hah, remembered it. Microsoft Works. 5.25 floppy was all it had other than an HDD of limited capacity. I put in a tape drive for backups.
Personal Computers Tandy Color Computer... with a 6809E Processor..... No real OS, just a Basic Interpreter.... Then a preProduction Mac 128K that came with a Non-Disclouser Agreement Institutional Computers Borroughs D12 running a Fortan IV Interpreter, in college Data General Mini running Cobol & SnoBal @ UofW Dec10 running DecOS with the Data General as an I/O PreProcessor @ UofW
C64 with tape drive. Eventually graduated to C128 with a built in 5 1/4" floppy, then got the external 5 1/4" floppy and could disk copy so quickly, lol.
Yeah, a trash80 was my first as well, in school. Though I had an older one that played floppy discs only, and had a word game called Tanka II. Never seen it again, but it was much like a word puzzle /adventure.
Apple IIc. Learned basic programming on it. Thought it something special when I could run a flight simulator because it had a whopping 640k of ram Not my picture, but that is the system, I even had the external disk drive. The first computer I bought was a Micron 486DX2. It had an 80Mb HDD and I thought I would never fill it up.
My first job was installing/maintaining early 1400 series and 360 systems. My favorite was a triplex CP67 system destined for French Canada. Its specs were microscopic compared to today's laptops.
Sanyo clone of PC/XT with 8088 TURBO! which brought it up to 8 (EIGHT!) MHz. I paid extra for the amber monitor and the second 5-1/4" floppy drive, and upgraded to FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE KILOBYTES of RAM! I was uptown! No hard disk. It was included in the NRI Master Course in MicroComputers and MicroProcessors that the Air Force helped me pay for.
I admit that it still amazes me that I have more processing power in my phone than my first PC (nevermind what they used to send people to the moon). Heck, there's probably more processing power in my INKJET PRINTER than in my first PC!
My first was an Apple IIe. Duo floppy drive, unbelievably slow! Used to write programs in Apple Basic.. That was a long time ago!!
Remember having phone cradles? Went to local tech school but by semester's end the system was already obsolete. When in college ('63+) "The" computer on campus took a specially built humidity temp controlled room about 40' feet long. Thousands of switches, tubes, etc. and the operator had to punch in a card with queries. Think it was $2 per question(for her time) and it might take 10-15 minutes for the answer to click out. We engineering students still were forbidden to use calcalulators but forced to use slide rules. Still have mine in it's little black leather case with handy belt loop.
